Man in the Empty Suit (18 page)

I watched the people take books away. “What is this?”

Emily picked another two books from the wagon. “We’re the book exchange.”

I stared at her, not understanding.

She said, “We get search requests and send the books on to those who need them. We used to run it from the main library, but it was simpler to do it from here. Could you hurry up and place some books? We don’t want this stack to topple.”

I looked up at the scaffolds, the painters working on top. “What are they doing?”

She followed my gaze. “Painting the new zodiac. Much more accurate.”

I didn’t ask how the zodiac had changed. The scaffold above me swayed, and I grabbed two books and found spaces to sandwich them in. When my wagon was nearly empty, I said to Emily, “If we place the books randomly, how are they ever found again?”

She smiled. “The books just seem to know to go where they’ll be found.”

Despite having eaten, I couldn’t focus enough to understand the system, and in light of what I had done and what lay ahead, I found the confusion of the room, the tasks, the ease with which everyone accepted me, refreshing. If I’d stopped to think about the strangeness of this, I might have fallen into old habits, old needs to piece together the puzzle. I decided that here was a puzzle that simply didn’t matter to me. Here was something I didn’t understand, a mystery I would leave behind me unsolved. There were bigger problems to worry me.

When my wagon was finished, Emily brushed her hands on her skirt. “Okay, now you know what’s going on. Go back to the library and get another wagon. We’ll be doing this until the sun gets low. You’ll have to move quickly.”

As I pulled the wagon back toward the entrance, I walked by the clock again. Some of the hands had moved, but as I watched, I could see that some moved too fast.

“What’s wrong with this clock?” I called to Emily.

She shrugged. “It’s been like that for years. Someone altered it, and no one turned it back. It’s kind of helpful, actually.” She smiled at what must have been a joke shared by the workers. “It always seems to know what time you need it to be.”

A school of tourists, mouths gaping, surrounded the information booth and snapped pictures of themselves standing in front of it smiling. I wondered what time the clock would show in the pictures, or if it would show any time at all.

I worked until it was too dark to see the stacks clearly, and the painters climbed down from their scaffolds. A new collection of workers arrived, swinging brooms and mops among the steady stream of vacant-looking tourists. Emily waved me over to the exit.

“You did a good job today, thank you.” She held a brown bag out to me. “Here’s some supper. If you’re up for it, we could use you tomorrow.”

I said I would be back. I didn’t know why. The work had calmed me a bit, and other than watching Phil’s building for signs of Lily, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I’d been exhausted when I’d arrived, and now I realized I’d also been lonely. The people bringing the wagonloads of books, all as tired and focused on working for their meals as I was, provided a different sort of companionship than I’d had in a long time.

I HEADED WEST
. The sun glowered in the low spaces between the buildings. I walked past the new trees of Bryant Park. Thin, sickly branches waved in the breeze dusting Forty-second Street with ash. Voices chattered through the trees and followed me west. I waited for fluttering green and gray wings of parrots fleeing my intrusion, their words close enough that I could make out single words and phrases. I kept turning to look behind me but saw none. “Only hurts a moment,” one said. “Great, great weather,” came the reply. I was tired enough to sleep, but I felt a need to talk, or at least to listen. Phil seemed the type willing to go on at length just for the sound of his own voice.

Music echoed down the stairs of his building. A radio played a quiet song, a woman singing words I couldn’t make out. I remembered the images of the video I’d seen and then
accidentally filmed on the stairway, the shadows of Screwdriver, me, carrying Lily’s body up the steps. For a moment I was overcome with guilt and grief in equal measure. They washed up my legs like a rising tide, and I swayed in their current. I felt no better knowing that in this time she was alive.

The climb was finishing me off. A small slice of light leaked below Phil’s door, and I wondered if he had drunk himself to sleep. I held the rail and steadied myself. When I could breathe again, I walked to the door and knocked gently.

Immediately the singing stopped. The music continued. I had interrupted not a radio but a woman performing, and I regretted being there. I almost turned to go when the woman called out, “Who is it?”

Not knowing what else to say, I answered, “I’m a friend of Phil’s. I can come back.”

Footsteps and the clank of falling junk. She approached the door, turned the locks. “No, it’s okay,” she called through. “He mentioned that someone might stop by.”

The bolts pulled back, the door opened. Lily stood in the doorway. Candles, too many to count, lit her from behind.

“I’m Sara. Phil’s daughter.” She reached her hand out to me, and I took it. She let go of mine again even as I willed her not to. “He mentioned he’d made a friend today. I thought he’d made you up. He sometimes does that.”

“I do not, you lying girl,” Phil’s voice, thick with alcohol, burbled. His arm waved from beyond a junk- and candle-laden table. Lily, now Sara, walked back into the room, the door open to me, her bare feet making no sound on the hardwood floor. Suddenly terrified, I entered. The heat of the candles wrapped around my head, and their perfume watered my
eyes. I struggled to see Sara as she moved through the room’s dark corners. I lost her in the shadows and waited for her to reemerge. The sound of her grew faint, and I heard whispered voices again just outside the window.

Phil lifted himself to a sitting position and held a jelly jar half full of amber liquid up to me. “My friends are never imaginary. Only my enemies.” He took a sip and then began to laugh until he had to lie back down. He disappeared behind the table. Sara melted into yellow candlelight, her face lit from beneath, and smiled.

“He’s been enjoying a bottle of whiskey.”

I nodded. “He enjoyed some I had with me earlier today.”

She laughed. “I should have known he met someone. He was in such a good mood.” She gestured for me to find a place to sit. My brown paper bag crinkled, the sides dark with grease. I offered her some of my dinner, not knowing what it was but certain I wanted to share it with her. She refused. I opened the bag and found three pieces of baked chicken and a triangle of cornbread. I apologized for my hunger and started to eat. Phil, lying on his back, began to talk. What he said sounded like the middle of a sentence begun hours earlier, a river of thoughts someone else had released, and I was left to find my way into the conversation without help. After a minute I realized he was musing about the uses of the many objects of his apartment once he was done cataloging them.

“I just need to make sure not to lose track of anything,” he said. “Once I get through the minutiae, the small stuff, I’ll be ready to open it up to the public. This is the stuff they need. Emma’s always saying that, she’s always saying how she
doesn’t have this or that. Well, I’ve got it. I’ve got it all, but it needs to be listed and organized, and then it’ll be ready to go back to work.”

Sara nodded and leaned forward to stroke his hair. “That’s right,” she whispered. He closed his eyes. His drink, sitting on his chest, moved up and down with his breath.

Candlelight glowed through Sara’s long white cotton shirt, revealed the shape of her body. I let my eyes linger, perhaps too long—she caught me looking. I tried to appear interested in chicken bones as I tossed them into the bag.

Phil, his eyes closed, said, “Have you seen my things?”

Sara smiled, a patient I-have-to-answer-this-so-often smile, and I smiled back. She said, “Yes, you know I have.”

“Not you, girl.” His eyes struggled open and rolled awkwardly to find me. “You. Have you seen my things?”

I looked around me. “Yes,” I said. “They’re very nice?” My compliment twisted out of my mouth as a question. I looked at Sara to see if I was on the right path. She winked at me through the low light.

Phil became upset, thrashed on the floor like a dying fish until he had turned onto his side, craned his neck to see me. “No, no. This is just crap. The sorting area. I mean my real things. The good ones. Have you seen them?” His eyes watered. Hard sounds clicked in his chest as he spoke. To Sara, his voice impossibly deep and filled with gravel, “Take him and show him. Would you, sweetheart?”

Sara uncoiled and rose from the floor. “Of course.” She searched for shoes under the table. I gathered the remnants of my meal and crushed the bag into a ball. Unsure where to put it, I carried it with me, followed Sara to the door. She stopped
and called over her shoulder, “We’ll be back in a few minutes.” Phil mumbled and waved, ushering us out.

Sara carried a small lantern. I followed, my mind racing. Seeing her was harder than I’d imagined it would be. This was Lily, but not yet, calling herself another name and caretaking her alcoholic father. This was the same set of stairs I’d watched Screwdriver carry her up.

At the third floor, she stopped at a door and turned to me. I could hear a smile through the dark when she said, “Get ready for his great collection of things.” Her laugh was slightly cruel. She opened the door, and we stepped inside.

The third-floor apartment was more densely cluttered than the one Phil lived in. The items were bigger, more organized, closer to clean. A line of refrigerators blocked the windows. A rebuilt car engine sat atop cinder blocks two feet from the door. The walls were dotted with nails and hooks on which hung assorted devices. Battery-powered screwdrivers, electric toothbrushes, music players, each in a sealed plastic bag and pierced onto the hook or nail. Each item was labeled or tagged, numbers and letters separated by dashes written in a looping hand, a catalog system that perhaps only Phil understood. Maybe not even him. Bookshelves stood in the room at seemingly random locations, each stacked with some particular item. Cans of beans, unopened battery packs, stacks of pristine telephone directories. The bookcases stood mute in the dark room; the lantern cast their shadows one way and then the other. I felt as if we’d snuck into a cemetery and looked over the names of dead we didn’t know, as if the things on these shelves were mysteries from a time unknown to anyone.

Sara set the lantern on the floor. “Welcome to Phil’s room of things.” She approached the shelves of beans and took one down, searched through her pockets for a can opener, and pried the top free. “Impressed yet?” She went to the kitchenette in the corner, found a spoon in the sink, and began to eat the beans from the can. “Come on in. He’ll quiz you about this stuff, so you’d better look around.”

I was entering a sacred space; Phil’s devotion made it special. Sara leaned against a kitchen counter and watched me as she ate. I surveyed clean blenders, shiny toasters, cords tucked in tight coils, boxes of forks, spoons, knives, no two alike but each polished to a shine even in the dark. Some of the nails in the nearest wall held photographs in frames, old pictures—a child laughing in a park, a woman on a boat, a man over a computer keyboard, a strange hat on his head and a curious smile on his face. From others dangled ballpoint pens still in bubble packs, children’s action figures, three pristine white bathroom tiles. At the center of the wall, a dark spot caught my eye. I leaned in. I was only inches from the item when I realized what it was. Inside the plastic bag, sealed tight against moisture and age and time, untouched for who knew how long, was the gun—the one I now had in my jacket pocket—as well as six bullets.

My hand sank into my pocket and wrapped around the same grip and trigger at which I looked. I held my breath a moment, felt my guilt and my hatred of the thing roll inside me, and then I pulled myself back. I turned away from the wall, guilty needles in my head, and found Sara gone. Across the room from me was a hallway, another unspace, dark and rattling with sounds of someone moving. I followed the
sounds, left the lantern behind me, and felt myself sink into the darkness. The air was thick and still, the windows closed. I breathed through my mouth to avoid smells of mildew, mold, rot. In between me and the streetlit windows, I saw Sara’s figure float across the room. I heard the squeak of bed springs.

Her voice cut into the darkness. “So what do you think of his things?”

“I don’t know. Some are better than others.”

“That’s true. I don’t care for the weapons.”

I agreed.

Several long moments scurried between us, me in the doorway of the black room and her sitting on an unseen bed, springs mousing out minor protests—nothing compared to what I imagined they might do, could do, I was certain, if I joined her. I held out a hand and steadied myself with the doorframe.

She said, “You know I’m not his daughter, right?”

“No, I didn’t.” At first I found this a relief. Then I realized all the complications it implied in her relationship with Phil. “What—”